"Go woke, go broke" might be close to a cliché at this point - but it still holds true.
In other, non-election news, Facebook is about to axe about 11,000 employees after its parent company, Meta, reported another less-than-stellar quarter punctuated by falling profits and tanking stock prices.
“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post sent to employees on Wednesday, per CNN. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.”
Meta, which has dropped in overall value by nearly 75% from its height of more than $1 trillion just last year, currently employs about 87,000 people. While revenue has tanked, the company's expenses reportedly increased 19% year-over-year.
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As newer social media sites like TikTok have entered the market, the company has struggled to compete for both users and ad revenue, a problem that’s only gotten worse in the face of mounting national inflation. Facebook has so far failed to draw in generations of younger users who've rejected the platform in favor of short video-based models, and has continued to lose conservatives' support in the wake of the company's open censorship of right-leaning voices and stories.
On top of the massive layoffs – the largest in the company’s history – Zuckerberg also noted the social media giant will be making cost cuts to its office space, including consolidating its work space to account for the fact that so many employees now work from home. The company is also extending its hiring freeze and chopping discretionary spending to try and stop the bleed while the company focuses on expanding its "metaverse" virtual reality concept.